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Can a Tarot card reading be defamatory?
161–170 of 231 posts
Re: Can a Tarot card reading be defamatory?
#162So, if I randomly generate headlines of varying rabid mania, I am not liable for defamation because I know they are random rubbish, but I still get the ad revenue ? Isn't this the business model for all current online news sources .. It does feel however it ought to be illegal - much like pissing in the drinking water.
This is essentially the whole argument Jerry Falwell made when Larry Flynt ran a spot in Hustler "accusing" him of having sex with his mother in an outhouse. The Rehnquist court unanimously booted the case. The First Amendment ain't easy. This kind of shit is often the price we pay for it.
Horses were great. Wading through streets full of horseshit wasn't.
We built boardwalks / pavements and industries sprang up collecting street dung and moving it to the fields and gun factories.
The algorithms run by Facebook et al are I suppose "boardwalks" in some sense as you don't need to steer off them unless you want (and there are definite left and right boardwalks available ! :-). Also worth noting that eventually governments took over doing boardwalk like things.
I wonder what other industries we shall see / can already see trying to deal with an already over stretched analogy
Re: Can a Tarot card reading be defamatory?
#163Interestingly the statement that “ defamation requires a provably false statement of fact “ is not true in all jurisdictions. German law makes a distinction between „Verleumdung“ which is indeed like defamation and “üble Nachrede“, which only requires a statement to not be probably true.
In Japan, defamation doesn't require falsehood. Yes, you can be punished for defamation for having told the truth!
> In Japan, defamation doesn't require falsehood. Yes, you can be punished for defamation for having told the truth!
Is it actually DEFAMATION then, not something akin to "false light"[1]? (I can't define such a term, since I lack both character and fitness, and thus lack a JD, and thus can't understand why some people seem to have different standards of behavior than others in this cursed commonwealth[2])
[1] https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/pennsylvania-false-light
[2] I'm not your friend, but I am in Pennsylvania today.
Re: Can a Tarot card reading be defamatory?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing you're missing here is that "opinion" is a term of art in this context, and has a meaning broader than its usual one. Importantly, for these purposes, any inference is considered "opinion". So "Professor Scofield plotted and ordered the murders" could be a statement of fact, but "The evidence I've shown you demonstrates that Professor Scofield plotted and ordered the murders" is necessarily a statement of o…
Suddenly I am wondering whether reports of "police have at times consulted with psychics" will enter in any way.
> Suddenly I am wondering whether reports of "police have at times consulted with psychics" will enter in any way.
But did they consult with psychics, or a greek lady who took their money, lit a candle, and said some ambiguous woo woo bullshit that happened to be right by coincidence?
I've yet to meet the former.
(Also, I'm not a police officer.)
Re: Can a Tarot card reading be defamatory?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, they're table manners for a nerd messageboard so a lot more subjective than defamation law. You can always reverse engineer something out of them explaining the quality (or lack thereof) of some specific comment, after the fact. Less subjective are the effects and you can see them here - if a comment mostly produces corrections and rules lawyering, it's not a great comment and fills up the thread with meta an…
> Less subjective are the effects and you can see them here - if a comment mostly produces corrections and rules lawyering, it's not a great comment and fills up the thread with meta and fluff. This is circular. I complained about this comment, therefore the comment is bad, and you can tell because I complained about it. I'd suggest it is the complaints that are noisy and should be avoided. > To take an even broader…
This is circular.
Circular, subjective, I'm not sure what the argument here is. There's no disagreement these rules don't meet the standards of formal logic.
Anyone looking for something to nitpick and fight about will succeed. [...] I'm not really even convinced discussing defamation on a post about defamation should be considered a tangent
Isn't that a tautology? Wait, we're not doing that.
It might not be a tangent, the tone and phrasing count too. For instance, people often write the good version of their comment after they get mod-berated, in defense of their originally iffy comment. Again, it's the effects that count. The poster could have easily written a less hackle-raising, summoning-reply-guys-to-the-reply-guy comment and we wouldn't need to define tangents from first principles to begin with.
Re: Can a Tarot card reading be defamatory?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who reads Tarot for friends, and may do so professionally in the new year, it depends a lot on the reading and the type of reading. Any reading that offers advice is opinion, but some opinions should be stated with more confidence than others. Given identical cards I might tell one person "Get out, he'll hurt you if you stay!" and another "I'm not sure this relationship is right for you, if you stay there'…
Are you arguing the tarot cards have any bearing on what you tell each person, or are you admitting they are just an excuse and what you say to each people is based on other things? Because I can sort of understand the latter, but how would you even justify the former here on HN, a forum for tech and science oriented people?
The sense I get from the person, what the cards say, and what my own predispositions say, all have a bearing on what I say during a reading. As for justifying the part determined by the cards, I can offer two:
-they might simply be a way of limiting what I can say since I'm not going to tell someone something completely counter to the traditional meaning. That limitation might force me to be more creative than if I was just going off my own predispositions alone.
-I also would hope tech and science oriented people wouldn't rule out that the question being asked has a bearing on what cards show up before running an experiment. I'm agnostic on that point myself, but I could expound at least two theories that would allow for that kind of foreshadowing without contradicting any beliefs that are held by at least a plurality of the HN crowd. What is contradicted by that belief is our instincts based on Newtonian physics, but those have already been proven incomplete.
Re: Can a Tarot card reading be defamatory?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Second doesn't seem to have hurt Fox News' business. > Fox News seeks dismissal at the pleading stage on two constitutional grounds. First, it asserts that Mr. Carlson’s statements on the December 10, 2018, episode of his show are constitutionally protected opinion commentary on matters of public importance and are not reasonably understood as being factual. ==== Can a statement made by an LLM be defamatory? "Ancient…
Can a statement made by [chr(random()&0xFF) for i in range(100)] be defamatory? With low probability, it may make sentences that appear as statements of fact but, as the article mentions, anyone familiar with the "speaker" (in this case python or in yours LLMs), knows that it's random nonsense.
Can ChatGPT produced text be defamatory? Does your answer depend on the prompt?
Re: Can a Tarot card reading be defamatory?
#168Greetings. I'm rather new here and a friend steered me towards here. I'm a pagan, and unfortunately this has caused a rather ugly stir in our communities. In recent (last 1.5 years), TikTok has been the primary contributing 'terrible occultists, witches, and pagans'. Their practices equate to what we would describe as cargo cultism, commercialism, and general lack of any understanding what we do. Most of us look down…
> And they should have never did this publicly.
"Contemplate the twelfth figure of the Tarot-Keys, remember the grand symbol of Prometheus, and be silent. All those Magi who divulged their works died violently, and many were driven to suicide." -Éliphas Lévi
Re: Can a Tarot card reading be defamatory?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Less subjective are the effects and you can see them here - if a comment mostly produces corrections and rules lawyering, it's not a great comment and fills up the thread with meta and fluff. This is circular. I complained about this comment, therefore the comment is bad, and you can tell because I complained about it. I'd suggest it is the complaints that are noisy and should be avoided. > To take an even broader…
This is circular. Circular, subjective, I'm not sure what the argument here is. There's no disagreement these rules don't meet the standards of formal logic. Anyone looking for something to nitpick and fight about will succeed. [...] I'm not really even convinced discussing defamation on a post about defamation should be considered a tangent Isn't that a tautology? Wait, we're not doing that. It might not be a tangen…
If we're just throwing accusations of logical fallacies back and forth now, than I'd point out we've reached the point in the conversation where we're having a literal tone argument. I don't find this to be a pedantic tone (my read is that they're adding detail rather than making a pedantic correction), if you do I don't see how I can convince you or be convinced by you, so I think we'll have to agree to disagree.
(To clarify, I don't mean to suggest these rules should be held to the standard of formal logic; maybe a better way to explain my criticism would be to say, if you leave a noisy complaint in response to a comment, you are responsible for your actions, not the commenter you're responding to. I can choose to leave a noisy comment in response to any post, no matter how careful someone is with their tone or how well they follow the guidelines; if I did so, it would be no one's responsibility but my own. I can't use my reaction to justify my reaction. Similarly, we can't criticize this comment as resulting in us defining a tangent; you and I made that choice.)
Re: Can a Tarot card reading be defamatory?
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you arguing the tarot cards have any bearing on what you tell each person, or are you admitting they are just an excuse and what you say to each people is based on other things? Because I can sort of understand the latter, but how would you even justify the former here on HN, a forum for tech and science oriented people?
The sense I get from the person, what the cards say, and what my own predispositions say, all have a bearing on what I say during a reading. As for justifying the part determined by the cards, I can offer two: -they might simply be a way of limiting what I can say since I'm not going to tell someone something completely counter to the traditional meaning. That limitation might force me to be more creative than if I w…
Sounds like a form of guided therapy.